The Benedictine abbey at Malmesbury in Wiltshire was one of that select group of English houses which could trace its history back to the golden age epitomized and chronicled by Bede. To Bede's older contemporary Aldhelm (ob. c. 709) belongs most of the credit for setting the recently founded community on its feet and for making it a by-word throughout the British Isles for the pursuit of divine and secular learning.2 During his abbacy Malmesbury eclipsed the reputations of the Irish schools and of Hadrian's Canterbury. At only one other point in its long history did the abbey attain a comparable reputation for learning, when it housed the monk William (c. 1095–1143), whose career, intellectual interests and writings were consciously modelled upon the examples of Bede and Aldhelm.

Milred, who was bishop of Worcester from 743 × 745 to 774 × 775, is almost as shadowy a figure in the history of Anglo-Latin literature today as he was in the sixteenth century when John Leland recorded in his Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis: ‘invidiosa vetustas Milredi monumenta destruxit’. The only composition by Milred that has come to light, in a single ninth-century continental manuscript, is the letter of consolation that he sent to Lull of Mainz after St Boniface's martyrdom. Apart from its inherent interest, this letter, with its elegant use of Vergilian echoes, is a valuable indication of Milred's literary interests and aspirations. Better still, it ends with a tantalizing glimpse of the literary world in which Milred lived: a postscript in which he apologizes for failing to send a copy of the picture poems of Optatianus Porphyrius because Cuthbert, the archbishop of Canterbury, had failed to return them. It was perhaps this very copy of Porphyrius that served as the model for the decoration of the Codex Aureus (Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, A. 135), which may have been produced at St Augustine's, Canterbury, during Cuthbert's time.

Two rules of the metrical grammar of the Beowulf poet are the subject of this paper. One concerns the variation of stress on the prefix un-; the other pertains to the alliteration of compounds. The two are correlated. The paper rests on the premise that the ‘metre’ of an Old English poem is only one function of a set of regularities that make it something we call verse rather than prose. Separately these regularities may be described as ‘rules’; taken as a group, the rules comprise a metrical grammar. Each Anglo-Saxon scop absorbed such a grammar during the course of long immersion in the poetic tradition of his culture. No two scops' metrical grammars could have been exactly alike; in addition to individual differences, there must have been regional and dialectal variations, although the poetic tradition ensured remarkable uniformity over a wide area and a considerable period of time, and only at the end of the Old English period, with let us say The Battle of Maldon, are significant changes manifest. Further investigation would therefore be needed to determine to what extent the rules here described apply to other grammars.

Until fairly recently modern commentators seem to have agreed that the gnomic sayings in Beowulf carry us away from the main current of the poem into the ‘doldrums of didacticism’. Now, however, at least two critics have suggested that these apparently trite old saws are in fact central to the epic and that they reflect a way of thinking about the aims and methods of literary composition that we no longer share. Instead of merely cataloguing their appearances, as earlier readers had done, Robert B. Burlin has persuasively shown us how the Beowulf poet uses at least some of the gnomic sayings effectively and skilfully to ‘give both shape and scope to his utterance…relating the actuality of his fiction to familiar universals in the appreciation of which his audience can easily concur’. Burlin himself does not set out to question the prevailing assumption that the gnomic sayings are ‘not in the same artistic league with the obliquity of the “digressions”’, but T. A. Shippey has gone on to point out that ‘they have power and beauty in their own right’. He also argues that the Beowulf poet was not especially original in his use of the gnomic sayings but in fact depended on their traditional function: ‘the poet was rightly but only exploiting…qualities incomprehensible to those who see them as linguistic phenomena devoid of social content’. Building on his own earlier work and on Burlin's analysis, Shippey suggests that the maxims in Beowulf reflect cultural ideals and that ‘they bind the characters, the poet, and the audience together in common assumptions too precious to be threatened, establishing what Professor Burlin calls “societal interdependence”, a theme very close to the heart of the poem’.

‘Forðy me ðyncð betre, gif iow swæ ðyncð, ðæt we eac sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, ðætweðaonðæt geðiode wendenðe we ealle gecnawan mægen.’ With these well-known words, King Alfred, in the prefatory letter to his Old English version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, enunciates the policy of translation he wishes to see implemented with a view to restoring wisdom and learning to his war-torn kingdom. In the last twenty years or so modern scholars have made a determined effort to define the contribution the king himself made to his scheme. Traditionally it had been accepted that he translated the Pastoral Care, Boethius, Soliloquies, Bede and Orosius. But it has now been firmly established that, while the first three works are his, both Bede and Or are to be excluded as the work of others.

It has long been recognized that the early sections of the so-called Historia Regum, a work attributed to Symeon of Durham (ob. c. 1130) and preserved uniquely in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 139 (written c. 1164 at Sawley, Lancashire) at 5 3v–130v, originally constituted a separate work, probably composed in the pre-Conquest period and subsequently incorporated into the Historia Regum. Thomas Arnold, who edited the Historia Regum for the Rolls Series in 1885, was persuaded ‘that the more attentively any experienced person may study the curious document between pages 14 and 94 [of the edition], the more firmly will he be convinced that it is a composition of the tenth…century’. His conclusions were based on the Latin style of the work, which he regarded as ‘pretentious and bombastical on the one hand, obscure and ineffectual on the other’ and which affiliated the work, in his opinion, with other Anglo-Latin works of the tenth century. Because he believed that certain passages in the work betrayed an origin in the congregation of St Cuthbert (then at Chester-le-Street), Arnold referred to the compiler of the early sections of the Historia Regum as the ‘Cuthbertine’. His conclusions appear to have been accepted by later historians; for example, W. H. Stevenson (who referred to the early sections of the work as SD 1) wrote as follows: ‘we may readily grant that SD 1 was an older compilation, but the evidence that it was drawn up in the tenth century is, in the absence of a MS of that period, necessarily hypothetical’. No such manuscript has yet come to light, but in recent times Arnold's postulation of a tenth-century origin for the early sections has been accurately and comprehensively reinvestigated by Peter Hunter Blair. By a series of detailed stylistic arguments Hunter Blair has been able to show that the first five sections of the Historia Regum (occupying pp. 3–91 of Arnold's edition) may reasonably be regarded as the work of oneauthor. These five sections are as follows: (1) Kentish legends, particularly pertaining to the Kentish martyrs Æthelberht and Æthelred (pp. 3–13); (2) lists of Northumbrian kings (pp. 13–15); (3)material derived from Bede, particularly the Historia Abbatum (pp. 15–30); (4) a chronicle from 732 to 802 (pp. 30–68); (5) a chronicle from 849 to 887, based mainly on Asser (pp. 69–91). Hunter Blair also recognized that two passages had been interpolated at a later date into the material of these first five sections: one concerning the relics of Acca of Hexham (pp. 32–8), the other concerning those of Alchmund, also a bishop of Hexham (pp. 47–50); he reasonably suggested that these interpolations were added at Hexham in the early twelfth century. As to the date of compilation of the five early sections Hunter Blair was able to affirm, albeit cautiously, Arnold's suggestion of a tenth-century date, but he concluded that ‘in the end judgement will perhaps rest upon opinions about [their] latinity’.

More than fifty years after its first appearance in print, Byrhtferth's Manual, or Enchiridion as he called it himself, is among the most puzzling texts of the Old English prose corpus. Its obscurity is due partly to its unglamorous subject matter – mathematics (computus) and the calendar – but more, perhaps, to its apparently bewildering organization. Humfrey Wanley called it an ‘opus miscellaneum’, Richard Wülker described it as ‘auβerordentlich bunter’ and Frederick Tupper referred to it as ‘that remarkable potpourri’. Indeed the Enchiridion seems often enough to wander aimlessly or shift abruptly; it seems to follow no plan and many an intrepid scholar has come away from it with the disquieting feeling that, having read a scientific primer, he has learned shamefully little science. As Heinrich Henel and N. R. Ker pointed out, the text has come down to us disarranged; but the restoration of the misplaced sections to their proper order only partly relieves the confusion. We may as well admit at the outset that Byrhtferth often digressed and often backtracked: as an organizer he was barely tolerable. But if we fail to understand the Enchiridion the fault is partly our own, for it was not Byrhtferth's intention to write a wholly self-contained book. As Henel ably demonstrated, the Enchiridion was designed as a commentary on the computus; this fact is the key we need to unlock the mysteries of Byrhtferth's work. To read it without referring to a computus would be as pointless as to read a biblical commentary without referring to a bible.

Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia from 956 to 983, is not an immediately familiar figure. Yet he was one of the most powerful men in the political life of his day. The author of the Vita Oswaldi was in no doubt of his importance in the disturbances which followed the death of Edgar:

The ‘first’ and ‘second’ law codes of Cnut are the last surviving codes issued in the name of an Anglo-Saxon king.They are the final fruit of the interest in kingship and law and in the inter-relationship of the two which characterized the period following the monastic revival in England and which is especially associated with the name of Wulfstan, archbishop of York. Although they are far from being complete codifications of Anglo-Saxon law, they draw extensively on earlier legislation. They are different in kind from much tenth-century law, which is usually more limited and administrative in content and character, and their nature and purpose invite further consideration.

Crop-marks revealing an archaeological site at Sprouston (NT 758362), Roxburghshire, the subject of this paper, were observed and photographed from the air on 22 July 1964, but the character of the site did not become evident until further observations were made in August 1970. In the flying programmes of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge Sprouston has been photographed from the air on fourteen subsequent occasions. The vertical and oblique photographs, III in all, in the University Collection, together with oblique photographs taken during the last few years by staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for Scotland, are the sole source of information about the site. No trace of any of the features to be described is ordinarily visible on the surface, as is only too apparent from walking over the ground.

Literary history emerges when critical readers in sufficient number move beyond primary recognition of individual texts into a secondary awareness of a scheme, a sense of the connections that exist between these texts.1 Literary history considers the development of a whole body of literature, tracing multifarious influences and innovations through time. In the course of Anglo-Saxon studies the slow and sporadic reappearance of the literary remains resulted in the late nourishing of a schematic or historical overview. As Wellek reminds us, ‘the antiquarian study of Anglo-Saxon remained…outside the main tendency towards literary history’2 that occurred in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. So, too, the special quality of Old English poetry itself contributed to the laggard creation of a history. It is difficult to map the path of a literature in which all dating is only good guessing and in which a tenaciously conservative oral—formulaic style makes attempts at suggesting influence hazardous.

This bibliography is meant to include all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1980. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. It will be continued annually. The year of publication of a book or article is 1980 unless otherwise stated. There is a separate section for onomastic studies for the first time. The arrangement and the pages on which the sections begin are as follows: